Elevator systems are in widespread use for carrying passengers between various levels in buildings, for example. For many years elevator systems operated based upon hall calls initiated by a passenger pressing a hall call button indicating a desire to be carried up or down from a particular floor. Many such elevator systems include hall lanterns that indicate a direction of movement of an elevator car arriving at a particular landing. The hall lanterns allow a passenger to determine whether they desire to get on a particular car based, in part, on whether that car is heading in the direction that passenger desires to travel.
Modern elevator systems may include a variety of different technologies for allowing passengers to place a call for elevator service. For example, destination entry systems allow a passenger to provide an indication of their intended destination floor before the passenger enters an elevator car. With such systems, a dispatch controller assigns a particular car to service that call. While such systems allow for improved efficiencies in traffic capacity, especially for larger buildings, they introduce certain difficulties in some situations.
For example, many destination entry systems do not have hall lanterns at the entrances to the cars, but instead have some other car indicator to allow a passenger to know which car they are supposed to take. Without a hall lantern indicating the direction that the car is moving, a passenger may get on a car expecting it to go in one direction when, in fact, it will travel in the opposite direction. This can be a source of confusion for passengers.
Such a situation is particularly problematic when a car arrives at the landing where the passenger expects to board an elevator car but that car is not yet traveling in the direction of that passenger's destination. It is possible for the passenger to enter that car and travel in the wrong direction. The car subsequently returns to the landing where the passenger already boarded the car. At that location the system expects the passenger to board the car and uses some sort of sensor for detecting whether somebody entered the car. As the passenger has previously boarded the car, the system assumes that passenger is not there and may cancel the passenger's intended destination. That passenger ends up confused and possibly frustrated because of what appears to the passenger as a malfunction of the elevator system.